I am attempting to buy uncut gems, cut them, and sell. The margins are there. However, demand for gems right now is abysmal. Not to mention people who flood the market with 15+ gems at once.
Farm low level ores.
Farm low level herbs.
Either stockpile orbs or turn them into low level gems. Either way = profit.
I have noticed some things you might generally ignore out of habit can be worth checking into.
For example, I was going to try and clear out my excess gems (everything but rubies) and posted a few on the AH to see if they sold. To my amazement, not only were they selling, they were selling at my fallback price of 300g very often. My top sellers are including orange gems (no strength) and yellow gems +resil and +mastery. After this I ended up working on acquiring more patterns and sold a lot of my old inventory of gems I thought I would have to vendor one day.
I suspect this to be very different from server to server though, a couple of times I had competition and sure enough prices would drop to 10g. I also wasn't reposting frequently (little competition anyways) and I didnt anywhere near empty out my inventory, but it was nice to simply sell those gems I already had and not have to worry about the shuffle for a while. I would also say on average I was getting more then I would've got for rubies out of these gems because I was able to go without competition at my fallback price.
I have a bunch of crafted items I need to dump, but as far as farming and selling mats go I will keep my usual lazy approach to doing some here and there. I post all my auctions for 12 hours when I get home from work or on the weekends and let them stay till they come back. I am not farming at a rate or care enough to repost items before they come back. I might stockpile the week before release and sell those items off as I need the room for the new mats.
As far as professions go I have all of them leveled and all alts are 80+ so I can continue to level them to max. I plan to do a lot of farming early on to support my character and make a little coin before I go back to being lazier about it.
As I work a lot I can't play the Ah as much as I used to however Im finding netherweave bags are still selling like hot cakes am making between 6-16g profit on them so they are more a volume seller. Im also selling a lot of wrath enchanting mats and lower level enchanting mats. Am planning to make at least 200 netherweave bags for mist start to sell to new monks.
Stockpiling some stuff I'm not willing to openly share! Muahuahua. All mine... precious...
When MoP hits I'm going to get so much gold it's not even funny.
Also flipping transmog items. High tier stuff on my main realm and everything I can on my alt realms.
I only do high tier stuff on my main realm as it's in that terrible pre-expansion lull that kills off EVERYTHING.
Makes for some good deals though. Grabbing an item worth 5k-10k for under 100g is such a rush!
Well I'm heading into Cata with 5 bank alts all with guild banks full of stuff. Bars, volatiles, inks, herbs, leathers, bolt of embersilks, hypnotic dusts, etc.
I continue to sell the stuff I've always sold, albeit at a slower rate now less people are playing/buying. I'm not stockpiling any 'finished goods' except glyphs, which is a risk because we know some will turn to dust. But I'd rather stockpile now (aiming for 60 of each) than have to spend the early days of the new expansion milling and crafting. I want enough to keep me going for 2-3 weeks at least.
Dragonslayer Hoddie - pretending to know what I'm doing!
Undercut like hell just to get rid of all of my crap :P I've ended up with bags full of previous xpack mats far too many times....